After a lie down we decided, despite our tiredness, to head into town and have a few beers. The streets were pretty quiet as its kinda the changeover period between the film festival and the music festival, but we had a nice dinner and went to a place we had a few good nights in last year, Coyote Ugly. Unfortunately the bargirls were pretty drunk, and their efforts at being sexy were pretty depressing. One girl kept calling everyone fuckers and shouting abuse at people, so everyone kinda slowly left. Inevitably It ended with her having an arguement with a friend of ours and when he argued back she hit the panic button and cops descended on the place and he had to get out of there. Pretty unpleasant unfortunately. We decided not to return again.
In the morning we got up and went into the centre of Austin to register. Hundreds of people were queueing, and we got our listings and the listings of everyone else. We would be playing at 12 midnight tonight, at the same time as one of the biggest bands in the world, R.E.M. Great! We can have a nice quiet practice instead of a gig… We checked out a few mentoring sessions – apparently the “Internet” is good for “Music”. Sounds crazy to me.
After some massive steak burgers – we’d better watch eating them – we returned to the house and got ready for the gig. We were hoping for a short soundcheck from 6 – 6.30, and we needed it because we weren’t using our amps. We called a taxi, and waited. Then we called it again and waited, eventually arriving at the cool little venue at seven and soundcheck missed. We also heard that some people were coming down to see it later, and we were pretty pissed off. All the showcases are run like clockwork, so there was nothing we could do. I fiddled about with the onstage amp to see how it worked and had a free beer.
We split up and headed off to see bands and check out all the venues, all individually trying to get into the right frame of mind for the gig. I popped up here to the convention centre and use the free internet, watching the steady stream of bands signing in and registering. Its a pretty daunting task to rise to the top with the thousands of bands here.. I guess our application starts in the Ninety Proof Lounge in two hours…
